Like so many, I am a huge fan of Kipling’s If. It’s a pillar of my beliefs and helps remind me where and how to focus my energies. There is an enduring nature to the poem and messages. It also touches upon a key tenet of how to live a productive life: control what you can control.
When thinking about inheritance and estate planning and all of the nuances, paperwork, and decisions, it is daunting. Couple that with the emotional work needed to first acknowledge that we should have cross-generational conversations, and then actually meeting the moment to have them, and it is even more daunting. It’s a lot!
So, what then? Can we let the specter of being overwhelmed be more important than our need to protect our families? One is better than none, to use the modern phrasing. We don’t need to do everything in one go. In fact, that’s basically not possible. But, we can start to get our estate and inheritance in order.
We can have the first conversation with Mom and Dad. We can ensure we know where the Will and Trust and other key documents are. We can take one positive action each month for the next year+ and make a whole lot of progress. We can start doing the hard things now so that our lives will be easier later. (Not to mention the space we will have to grieve when we’re not stressing about paperwork at the same time!)
We can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds of effort. We can help ourselves. We can help our families. We can move ourselves forward…